Portrait of the Artist as a Young Asswipe. Matt Johnson’s film concerns a seminal summer in the nascent career of a young, pretentious punk-ass who eventually grows up to become Anthony Bourdain, capturing, in essence, a young man at the precise crux between his reach and his grasp. As beloved as the later-day Bourdain, the one-time high-end chef, turned tell-all memoirist, and eventual global TV mainstay, became, by his own admission, his early years were pockmocked by fits of self-absorption, self-destruction, and grating irascibility that, to his considerable credit, he has never shied away from (in the film’s epigraph, he refers to himself in that era as a “spoiled, narcissistic brat.”) 

The question, then, is whether or not Destin Daniel Cretton’s new Spider-Man picture, the fourth installment in this series, can keep this positive mojo going. Whereas I’m typically rubbish at the predictive market  —  this is the guy who was convinced Supergirl would do just fine  — if nothing else, the film certainly deserves to be a hit, not something one would have said about many of the more recent bloated, lifeless MCU installments since the groundbreaking Avengers: Endgame back in 2019. 

Based loosely on the classic western True Grit, the original comics focus on a dispirited Kara (Supergirl’s actual name), taking refuge on a distant planet, and becoming embroiled in a dispute between a fierce, young girl named Ruthye, whose family was  brutally murdered by the villain Krem of the Yellow Hills, part of a group of bloodthirsty brigands terrorizing the local planets. When this same Krem shoots and poisons Kara’s beloved dog, Krypto, she and Ruthye track down the pirates together, in a race against time, in order to get the antidote, and settle things up between Ruthye and Krem.